Trek’s Broadside: Made for Mad Max

This bad-ass, nut-busting ride comes from the fevered imaginations of the designers at Trek bikes. Called The Broadsider, the bike was made to a fictional brief featuring a post-apocalyptic story “of the legendary cliff racer Max Malco who lost his life saving a young boy from his racing rivals.”

Sound familiar? That’s because it rips-off the story of Mad Max, right down to the first name of its main character. And if you’re going to steal ideas from a movie to make a bike, it probably should be the still-awesome Mad Max.

The Broadsider is a concept project, but a look at the pictures gives an idea of the specs. The first “spec” on the list should be weight. This thing surely comes in at well over 60-pounds. Next are disk-brakes, likely needed to stop something this big if you ever manage to pedal it to the top of a hill and haul it over the crest.

Low gears are assumedly a given, but its the styling that is the point here, from the bar-grips that look like (and might just be) old inner-tubes, through the saddle which could have been stitched together by Frankenstein, to that top-tube, which I pessimistically described as nut-busting up there in the first paragraph.

This bike will probably never make it out of the near-future back to the boring present day, but if you are visiting the Trek World show this week, you may be lucky enough to see it.

UPDATE: Trek’s Senior Industrial Designer, Michael Hammond, mailed to say that the Broadside actually weighs “around 45lbs…nonetheless it’s still a bugger to pedal up hill.” He also points out, in case anyone actually needed convincing, that “Max is just a bad-ass post-apocalyptic name!” We totally agree.